Justin Townes Earle savors his return to Callaghan's

Justin Townes Earle has rebounded since the "fairly rough patch" that yielded the songs on his most recent album, but don't expect him to start churning out happy songs. (Joshua Black Wilkins photo)

There’s a certain ritual to a Justin Townes Earle appearance at Callaghan’s Irish Social Club, like the one coming up on Monday.

“You know, I booked Justin again,” co-owner John “J.T.” Thompson will say. “It’ll probably be the last time. He’s getting so big I don’t think we’ll be able to afford him, a little place like this.”

This has been going on for a couple of years, and Earle’s profile in the world has indeed risen. In fall 2009 the Americana Music Association picked him as its emerging artist of the year. At about the same time, GQ magazine picked him as one of the 25 most stylish men in the world, dubbing him “The Earle of Honky Tonk.” More recently he made a cameo in the HBO show “Treme,” alongside songwriter Steve Earle, his father.

The upshot: This time around, when Thompson passed the word that the very limited supply of tickets would be put on sale at 10 a.m. on a certain Monday, they were set at $45 a pop. And they were gone by about 10:10 a.m., Thompson later reported.

It’s a mixed thing, even for Earle himself.

“Unfortunately we’ve had to drive the ticket price through the roof, to be able to do it, but I like playing at Callaghan’s since the first time I played there,” said the songwriter. “J.T.’s a great guy and they make a ... fabulous cheeseburger.”

So what, exactly, convinces 50 or so people that it’s worth $45 and a rough Tuesday morning to see some guy play a Monday night show someplace that isn’t exactly a concert hall?

It starts with the music, of course. Earle’s dominant influences seem to be Texas legend Townes Van Zandt, whose songs he often sings; Hank Williams Sr., who’s present in his lean look and his way of laying emotion bare; and Paul Westerberg of the Replacements, for a dose of indie-rock abrasiveness.

It would be hard to go wrong with a mix like that, even if you were just paying tribute. But Earle writes his own songs and is adept at getting them across. In a town infamous for the chattiness of its audiences, people listen. The whirr of a cooler kicking on behind the bar, a sound you normally wouldn’t even be able to hear, can be jarring.

With Earle, none of this comes easy.

“We actually had one incident at Callaghan’s,” he said, thinking back to a time when the ticket price was up to $15 or so, which at the time was enough to freak some people out. But others were chatting. “I stopped in the middle of a song and told them they needed to shut ... up because some people had paid their hard-earned money to get into the show and if they didn’t, I wasn’t going to play anymore.”

Note to aspiring performers: Throwing down the gauntlet that way is one thing. If you can bristle like that and still have folks pay more to come back the next time, you’re in rarified air.

Back to the music. The latest visit follows the release of “Harlem River Blues,” an album that departs quite a bit from Earle’s sparse but powerful live style. In the title track alone, there’s electric guitar, organ, choral flourishes.

Earle says it’s no problem bringing richer arrangements back down to the essential core for his live shows, which usually feature one or two supporting players at most.

“It’s a pretty easy transition,” he said. “When I write the songs I hear — I’m a pretty big-picture writer — I hear a lot of the music that goes onto the record in the first place. And so it’s pretty easy for me to subtract a lot of it.”

In fact, by the time the song makes the album, that process usually has already happened.

“It’s really rare on a record that I have a song that people haven’t heard yet, because that’s kind of how I test them,” he said. “I like the trial-by-fire thing. It helps me go through and make sure everything’s working right, and it helps me put together the set for the next tour.”

“If you write a good song, it can be translated in any way,” he said. “You can do it in any fashion you need to do it in. Live, what we do is, we supplement a lot of the sound that’s missing from the record with my fingerstyle guitar. That takes up a lot of room. I definitely play guitar differently live than in the studio. The way I play in the studio is a lot more subdued.”

Live, his playing is as much percussive as melodic. When he breaks a string, it’s usually one of the big ones. He did this twice in one night at a previous Callaghan’s show and had to beg off giving an encore — until area player Bobby Butchka, in an act of supreme musical bravery, offered his instrument as a substitute.

“I’m fairly rough on instruments,” Earle said. “I knock holes in the face of my guitars a lot. I usually buy myself a new guitar every year, just to make sure I have something to beat on.”

“Harlem River Blues” has an upbeat feel, though the lyrics, on closer examination, often turn out to illustrate the hard lives of laborers, scrabblers and folks who can’t find the love or safe harbor they need. Earle said the songs came out of “a fairly rough patch” in his life when he was sliding back into the alcohol and drug abuse of his youth.

“Everything was just kind of slowly falling apart around me,” he said. “I managed to keep my professional life rolling, but my personal life was falling to pieces ... And I think the record kind of reflects that kind of desperation, basically.”

“But I have a tendency to write these really happy-sounding chord progressions with really down-and-out lyrics,” he said. “So that’s probably about as happy as you can hope for.”

Even if his personal life goes all sunny?

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve had a pretty ... rough life. I’ve still got a lot of sorting-through, I’ve got a lot of closets full of skeletons and a lot of buried bones everywhere. I’ll probably never write a ... shiny happy people style record. It’s just not in my nature.”

Not that it’s all doom and gloom. He still gets to play places where the audience pays attention and the cheeseburger serves as a nice bonus.

“I just hope everybody has a good time,” he said. “That’s what the live performance is about. It’s one of my favorite parts of the whole process. Otherwise we wouldn’t spend countless hours in 15-passenger vans blowing across the US, because that’s not really the most fun part of it at all.

“Our lifestyle on the road, we get about two hours of pure enjoyment and fun out of playing every night and after all that it’s all kind of routine. It’s hotel, truck stop, road, truck stop, sound check. ... I just hope that they bring that Mobile good times with them, that friggin’ Mardi Gras spirit. And bring their appetite for the burger.”